"To be free was a crime"

In Russia, “dark times” have begun again”: this sentence ends an article written by Lyudmila Ulitzkaja in January 2022, five weeks before the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. The Russian writer says what has long been obvious: at the time the Russian human rights organization Memorial had just been banned, Ulitzkaja paid tribute to it in the text in question. Memorial, which has since been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, was an anchor of humanity in Russia, a guarantee that the Stalinist past would not be forgotten. A democratic relic.

This text is called "Don't forget the memory", and this is also the name of the volume with essays and (autobiographical) stories by Ulitzkaja that has just been published in German. Ulitzkaja has been one of the most famous Russian authors for many years. She became known in the 1990s with the stories "Sonechka" and the novel "Medea and her children". Shortly after the start of the Russian war of aggression, the Kremlin opponent went into exile from Moscow to Berlin, where she lives today. When reading, one is of course curious to see how the 79-year-old looks back on the "dark times", how she experienced the turning point in time.

But for the most part, the volume "Don't forget the memory" is a personal memoir. Apart from three, the selected texts were written before February 2022. In them, Ulitzkaja deals with death and the dead of her family, she recalls her time as a samizdat activist and as part of bohemian art in Soviet Russia, she writes about her relationship to her body and her world view as a geneticist and biologist ( Ulitzkaja originally studied biology in Moscow).

Two core lyrics – “My Name” and “My Body and Its Scars” – are largely associative, non-chronological and written with almost no punctuation, sounding strongly of farewell; as if she didn't have much time left to write: "There is only one meaning left - to/ form daily life to text/ if I don't do that, there will be nothing left/ a question only for the Last Judgment - for who else .”

There is nothing wrong with these personal reflections; one reads them with profit. In the texts on her biography, her clothes, her sexuality there are also interesting thoughts and digressions on her understanding of the state, on anthropology, on the lack of freedom of the individual in Soviet times - she notes: "Part of my life happened in that time when a free person was perceived as a madman, a leper, a suicide, or just plain stupid. Being free was a crime. It was the time of communist totalitarianism.” You also get to know Ulitzkaja and the circle of oppositionists to which she went during Soviet times – she belonged to an artist clique around Andrei Krasulin, her current husband.

And yet there is a disconcerting focus in the few texts dealing with the world after February 24, 2022. To be sure, Ulitskaya despises and abhors the Kremlin's policies. In the last running text of the volume, she longs for the day when Putin will be put on trial and wishes that it would be modeled on the Nuremberg trials. As the war of aggression begins, she writes: "Pain, fear and shame - these are the feelings today."

But the perspective is always Russian. There is hardly a word of empathy about the Ukraine, about the Ukrainian victims, they actually only come up briefly once - as refugees looking for shelter and asylum in Berlin. Ulitzkaja deals with the Russian future more than with the Ukrainian one. In a recent interview, she also emphasized the close, centuries-old ties, the "blood relationship" between Ukrainians and Russians, and the long-standing dependence of Ukrainians on Russians. A perspective with which she is currently not making any friends in Ukraine.

It is interesting that when asked about the often claimed “Russian soul”, she herself speaks of a Russian cold mentality: “However, there has always been an astonishing lack of sensitivity among us when someone was being harmed. People inflicted suffering on others without feeling the slightest sympathy,” she says in a June 2022 interview that ends this volume.

"Don't forget the memory" is worth reading despite some blanks. One would like to agree with Ulitzkaja in many respects, for example when she writes about the complete lack of civil society structures and the lack of a culture of remembrance in Russia or when she deals - somewhat too fatalistically - with the climate catastrophe. Nevertheless, it is irritating that the Ukrainians and the currently difficult relationship between Ukrainian and Russian intellectuals appear so little in it.

Lyudmila Ulitzkaja: Don't forget the memory. Translated from the Russian by Ganna-Maria Braungardt and Christina Links. Hanser, 192 pages, 23 euros